Artemis Fowl: Master of Crime and Entertaining Reading
I’ll bet you thought that fairies, trolls, goblins and dwarfs were just children’s stories, no speck of truth and for entertainment purposes only? Not so. Once common sights and living alongside humans on this earth’s surface, they have retreated underground, where they have built themselves a great, technologically advanced civilization completely hidden from human knowledge.
And leprechauns? Well, stories get tangled with time and words morph many directions. No, there aren’t really leprechauns hiding their pots of gold at the end of every rainbow, but there is an underground organization called LEPrecon, a crack division of LEP, the Lower Elements Police. And what we simple humans know as leprechauns are really fairies, and over the millenia our knowledge of LEPrecon has evolved into the word and imaginary world of the leprechauns. But the gold – well, yes they do have gold, and plenty of it to be sure, but just not at the end of any rainbow.
So who is Artemis Fowl? A criminal genius with extraordinary mental abilities and only twelve years old. He has discovered the existence of the world of the fairies and he hatches a plan to steal their gold. Aided by Butler, his hulking and huge servant, bodyguard, and only friend, Artemis undertakes this dangerous scheme and …
This book is fun, fun, fun! It is full of surprises and humor. The characters are well developed. Its equal parts James Bond with its great gadgets and mega-criminal, and fairy tale with its mythical beings and magic. Agent Q, meet Foaly, the wise-cracking centaur! The writing is excellent, fast moving, and full of memorable lines. This is a book to own just so you can underline the fun, quotable passages and share them with your friends or use them on your enemies; you may want to keep track of details as the plot unfolds.
This book isn’t brainless, occultish drool where the writer uses magic to get him or herself out of a jam of bad plotting or to indulge in new-age frippery or some wacked-out will-to-power-through-magic, but a complete integration of magic into the rules of the world in which the book takes place. But really, the magic is mostly in the highly advanced and imaginative technology that the fairies have developed. Well, no, really the magic is all in the book that Eoin Colfer has given to us.
Related posts:
